The Principal
For Rachel Harris, finding 'normal' after the shooting has been a long, tough journey
Rachel Harris has been principal of Santa Fe High School since 2017.
Five years ago, in the summer of 2017, Rachel Harris became principal of the single high school in the small Texas community where she grew up.
A month later, in mid-August, Hurricane Harvey slammed the Texas Gulf Coast, damaging more than 1,000 homes in the Santa Fe Independent School District as it flooded much of the Greater Houston area.
Then, on the morning of May 18, 2018, days before classes ended, a 17-year-old student walked into the art complex at the back of the high school and opened fire, killing 10 and injuring 13 in the fifth-largest mass casualty event in K-12 education.
Harris, a former English teacher, assistant principal, and central office administrator who has spent all but one of her 22 years as an educator in Santa Fe, has stayed in her position through everything, including the pandemic that closed schools 22 months after the shooting. This was her first in-depth interview about the tragedy and the lessons she has learned over the past five years as the leader of a 1,200-students school.
“Absolutely, it 100 percent feels like we’ve jumped from one tragedy to the next,” Harris said when asked about the past five years and why she hasn’t left the school or district. “But I feel like I needed to help us rebuild. I needed to protect the kids’ interests and protect the interests of our teachers and staff.
“There’s no single answer to how you do something like this, how you get through a tragedy like that,” she said. “Every community and every school are completely different.”
Staff ‘driven to help,’ then angry
Prior to the shooting, Harris said Santa Fe’s teachers and staff treated each other like family. In the immediate aftermath, they held each other up. But as time wore on, relationships were tested as employees dealt with trauma and grief in various ways.
“Love, support, and grief happen in every situation like this. When you have such a horrible tragedy, it breeds hate, animosity and anger,” she said. “You have an outpouring of support and then the hate comes out. It happens in each space and each time. You can see it now in Uvalde.”
Turnover is expected in every school from year to year, but Harris said the staff who returned in the fall of 2018 were “driven to help.” New staff members hired over that summer replaced teachers who planned to leave before the shooting, and “the two or three who left after were given opportunities in other districts. It was all because of other life circumstances.”
About this series:
This is the second of six pieces that expand on my freelance article focusing on how the Santa Fe, Texas, school district is moving forward following an on-campus shooting in May 2018. To read the story, which appears in the December 2022 issue of American School Board Journal, click on this link.
By the end of that year, however, Harris said she noticed an uptick in turnover. But it was at end of 2019-20 — when in-class instruction was halted by COVID — when the largest number of staff resigned.
“That’s when the anger and the hate came in,” Harris said. “They were angry that they couldn’t do anything to prevent what happened. Everyone was still dealing with trauma and trauma is ugly.”
Staff members were offered mental health services in the aftermath of the shooting. Four-plus years later, those counseling services remain available through the Santa Fe Resiliency Center, which was started in a local church and now has offices in a strip shopping center near the high school.
“We were very family oriented prior to May 18,” Harris said. “There was an already established family atmosphere in the high school and in the district. For some people, that made it more difficult to leave when they should have. They weren’t healing well and they weren’t moving on from it.
“It wasn’t easy, but to be honest with you some needed to go because they just couldn’t get past walking into the same building every single day,” she said. “We offered them help and counseling. We had all the things in place, but that doesn’t mean they’re still going to react well to it.”
Understanding the Wide Range of Emotions
Most of the students killed and injured in the shooting were ninth graders. While the entire school and community suffered, the aftermath was especially hard on the Class of 2021.
Harris said apathy really hit the class when they returned for their senior year after leaving abruptly due to COVID. Santa Fe’s schools resumed in person in the fall of 2020 and Harris said many students felt like they were being forced to return.
“By far, that class took the brunt of everything — Harvey, the shooting, then Covid,” Harris says. “I’m not a therapist or a psychologist, but I have a very strong belief that by the end, they were just done. They had no more drive to get through one more thing. Getting those kids across the stage that year was way more difficult than I’ve had at any other time.
“This community wanted to go back to school. They wanted normalcy,” she said of returning to in-person classes in the fall of 2020. “We tend to be a conservative community, and a lot of our parents were working outside the home. They needed their kids to go to school so they could go to work. And being so rural in parts of our district became a big issue for us. It wasn’t easy to get virtual learning out there to many places. But it was so hard on those seniors.”
As the leader of her school, Harris said she has come to understand the wide range of emotions the community has felt since the shooting and since COVID.
“I paid attention to what the kids needed and what the staff needed and took my lumps in the community. The community has healed at a different rate, and I’ve taken a lot of flak from certain people about the decisions I made,” she said. “One of the hardest things to communicate was that I was very actively listening to the kids and what the kids needed.”
For some, especially those grieving the loss of loved ones, a big fear is the victims will be forgotten. And yet, Harris also sees the other side: The students “who are tired” of the extra security in place and “just want to be normal.”
“No one will ever forget what happened. Seriously, how can anyone live in this community and forget it? We have to find some way to return to normalcy because our students will start to resent not moving forward too,” she said.
After the Class of 2021 graduated, the school district opted to hold classes in person this year on the anniversary of the shooting. All but one staff member who remained from 2018 was at the school on May 18, 2022; the missing staff member had a previously scheduled absence.
Now, as the fifth anniversary approaches, Harris said her staff is starting to become “more confident” about the future. She attributes it in part to the passage of time and a genuine desire and conscious effort to heal.
“We’re not stepping on eggshells as much. You don’t hear people say, ‘Wait, wait, wait. We need to slow down,’ anymore,” Harris said. “Overall, not in every case, but overall, the community and the high school have gotten to a place where we want to focus on the positive and on making things better. Always remember. Never forget. But let’s move forward.”
Staff and Administrators Need Help in Aftermath
For Harris, watching employees and children struggle day in and day out was exhausting. At the urging of her husband, a military veteran who had been deployed to Iraq, Harris saw a therapist to deal with PTSD. She also stayed off social media and away from the news for more than a year.
“First responders are required to get therapy after something like this, and I think educators should be too,” she says. “For the people who were on the front lines of this, we would all always check on each other, but we weren’t doing OK. All of us would say we were fine, and we’d never allow ourselves to say we weren’t. We had everyone else to worry about. Over time, it affects you.
“I’ve seen this with all kinds of leaders. They believe everyone else needs to go see someone, and then they don’t do it for themselves,” Harris said. “But PTSD comes in different forms for leaders. Dealing with the details of the initial tragedy is something that easily goes way, or at least it did for me. But my trauma came from the fear of making a wrong decision, the fear that every move I was going to make was going to be scrutinized, that people would be angry or hurt by a choice that I made. Understanding that fear and learning how to deal with it was very important for me.”
Harris and her husband have two daughters, both of whom were enrolled in Santa Fe’s schools at the time of the shooting. Her oldest was a freshman on May 18; now in college, she is majoring in social work — a vocation Harris believes her daughter chose to pursue given what she endured during high school.
“I know what parents were going through, but in a different way,” Harris said. “I knew my daughter wasn’t in that part of the building, but she could have been. It was very scary, and I understand why parents have that trauma. You just don’t drop your kids off at school thinking something like this is going to happen.”
Now, Harris wants her staff and students to become more involved in “things that are fun and normal.”
“High school is supposed to be fun. I want our kids to become excited about our test scores, about the good things we are doing. I want them to get excited about homecoming and graduation. Our staff needs fun things, too. As leaders we need to tell them it’s OK to have a staff party. We need to tell them it’s OK to take a step out and enjoy being alive, essentially.”
Given the turmoil Harris has faced, I asked again why she has stayed.
“I didn’t want to abandon them,” she said of her staff and students. “That’s probably what kept me there during the toughest years. After it started to subside, the love just came back. It was just…”
She pauses. “When a school goes through a tragedy like this, once you start to heal you recognize why you loved being there in the first place. I think that’s why I’ve stuck around.”
Coming Next: The Police Chief.